Generally
speaking, access to Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.com involves paying some
sort of subscription. In practice, public libraries with public
computer access tend to have a subscription to one or other site, so if you
have computer access at your local library then you can in such cases access
one or other site free of cost.

Often local
history societies have a website which carries copies of census data for a
locality, and numerous individuals have person family-history websites which
reproduce census data on family members. Thus “Googling” a
name can throw up census data, but such cases are exceptional.

Accuracy Caveat

Cursive
handwriting is notoriously difficult to decipher, sometimes. Initials
are especially subject to misreading. “S”, “I”,
“J” and “T”, for instance, are often confused, all
being sometimes written as a roughly vertical stroke with vague wiggly bits
at each end. This transcription problem used to produce errors in
newspapers, as they where composited from handwritten articles. In the
case of census data, the same problems mean that searching on-line databases
can fail to find things because of such transcription errors affecting the
transcribed data which is searched.

Luckily, images of
the original documents concerned can be read on the above-mentioned websites,
allowing one to make one’s own interpretation of initials, street names
and places of birth, which are often manifestly wrong in the transcribed
data.

Census information
in this website should not be taken as an exact statement of what is
contained in the census record, but should be taken as the writer’s
reading and interpretation of the census record.